Saturday Night Live kicked off Season 52 last night with its version of a big interview: Partway through “Weekend Update,” the co-anchor Michael Che brought on the Anthropic CEO and co-founder Dario Amodei (played by the cast member Jane Wickline) to address the crowd. Amodei would presumably use the moment to put viewers at ease about AI, after multiple high-profile incidents raised fears about the technology escaping human control.

I don’t mean as in when you place your hands
the way your grandfather did, fingers just so
that when blown into ducks would fly
from reeds and sedges, and the assembled
hunters in brown canvas would raise their arms
to the call, and fire into the unsuspecting flock
of iridescent greens and reds, shimmering blues down the backs.

Subscribe here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube
What would it be like to wake up one day with the ability to greet the world with warmth, patience, grace, and affection? This is what happens to the main character in the Pulitzer Prize winner Ayad Akhtar’s magnificent new novel, The Radiance. It is a tale of spiritual transformation in which Akhtar gives a detailed description of our inner landscapes.

Don’t you dare go inside the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts! It’s much too dangerous. They have had murders there for 39 straight years—every night, and some matinees too. And they still haven’t caught the culprit. Nightly murders, with groups of middle schoolers sitting there, applauding. Murders in a hair salon, of all places! Sheer madness.
It is not just the murder capital of Washington. Revolutions happen there, frequently.

The world has watched Russia’s war against Ukraine largely through the movement of its front lines. But behind those lines, Moscow is building something more durable: a hidden state inside Ukraine. Across the Russian-occupied parts of Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia, and Kherson, Russian institutions are steadily replacing Ukrainian ones and reshaping the routines of everyday life.
Schools teach Russian curricula.